How much do AI companies pay per minute of video?

Everyone with a library of footage asks the same first question. There is one widely reported figure, a handful of published price structures, and a lot of variation underneath them. Here is what is actually on the record.

What is the reported rate per minute?

A Bloomberg story from January 2025 put the price at $1 to $4 per minute of video. The story was about creators selling footage they had never published (outtakes, B-roll, unused takes), and it named OpenAI, Google and Moonvalley among the companies buying.

That works out to $60 to $240 per hour of footage. On that basis:

Two cautions before you multiply your own hours. First, this is a press report of what some buyers paid at one point, not a rate card. Second, it applies to footage the buyer actually wants and can use, which is rarely all of a library.

Do any buyers publish a per-minute price?

None of the companies we checked on 7 November 2026 publishes a per-minute or per-hour rate for video. What they publish instead:

• Labelbox Prism prices by dataset: roughly $50K for a small, focused set, rising past $1M for big enterprise deals. You get a fee when you sign and a cut of revenue afterwards, and exclusivity is its starting position.
• AWS Data Exchange lets you set your own price and charges a listing fee: 3% on public offers, and 3%, 2% or 1.5% on private offers depending on contract size.
• Kled AI, an app that pays individuals for uploads including short videos, does not publish its rates. Its 2025 post says payouts go by Cash App, Venmo, PayPal or Solana.

Our video buyers comparison sets these side by side.

Why might you be paid less than $1 a minute?

The reported range is the top of the market for good, cleared footage. Several things pull a real offer below it:

• Rights gaps. Commercial music, people without releases or client-owned shoots make footage unusable until fixed.
• Duplicates. Multiple exports of the same material count once.
• Narrow subject matter. A thousand hours of the same view is worth less than a hundred hours of varied scenes.
• Low resolution or heavy compression. Camera originals beat platform downloads.
• Exclusivity terms. A buyer asking for exclusivity may pay more; a non-exclusive license may pay less per minute but leaves you free to license again.

Can footage earn more than $4 a minute?

Sometimes, when it is scarce. Footage of rare events, hard-to-film environments, specialist activities or particular camera setups can be worth more because it fills a gap in a training set. That is why Prism prices whole datasets rather than minutes: a small, unusual library can be worth more than a large, ordinary one.

How big can it get? Shutterstock, per a June 2024 Bloomberg article, earned $104 million in a single year (2023) by licensing its library to AI developers. That is a stock library with a huge cleared catalog, so it says more about demand than about what any single archive should expect.

How do I get a realistic number for my library?

1. Count usable hours. Remove duplicates, test clips and anything you do not own.
2. Split by rights status. Fully cleared, fixable (music to strip, for example), and not licensable.
3. Describe the variety. Places, subjects, years, conditions, resolution.
4. Run the range. The footage calculator applies the reported rate to your cleared share.
5. Talk to a buyer whose published rules fit. Only a buyer that has seen the footage can price it.

If you want a starting point, our page on how to sell video data to AI lists the companies that publish terms, and the form asks only for a description, never the footage itself.

So what is a fair expectation?

For a creator with a few hundred hours of clean, unused B-roll, the reported range suggests a deal worth thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, if a buyer wants that footage. For larger archives, dataset-level pricing of the kind Prism publishes is the more relevant reference. Either way, treat any figure as a ceiling until a buyer has looked.

The reported rate is a useful yardstick; the cleared share of your library is what decides how much of it you can actually use.